Friday, August 31, 2018

We’re trained as a
people to respect the sanctity of the vote. If the people vote a certain way,
then that’s the way it should go. I can’t quite break that conditioning, as it
does strike me as a decent way to make decisions, at least up to a point (hi
Bill of Rights!).

Trouble is, this
process has been corrupted. I’m not simply talking about voter fraud here,
although that’s pretty huge and another factor. The problem I have with how
it’s done today is, if the people vote the way the leaders want (and the
leaders have endless money and other capacity to convince people to vote that
way), then it very quickly gets done that way, and the issue is never addressed
again.

For example, I’d
love to have another vote on income tax, since it’s clearly gone far beyond
what it was promised to be (namely, only a tax on the very wealthy)…but, too
bad, my grandfather apparently voted for it, and so we’re stuck with it forever.
I’d love to be able to vote to get rid of all the victimless traffic fines—the typical
response when people see a highwayman’s car (i.e., “police car”) on the road
today is fear because of their primary activity. But, somehow, that vote option
never seems to come up again.

On the other
hand, if people vote against what the
leaders want…the vote just comes up again next year. If you vote to raise sales
tax, for example, it goes up and stays up forever. If the tax fails to get
enough votes, well, then, the people have to vote it down again next year, and
the year after, and the year after, and so on.

Even when the
vote can’t come up again, the leaders really drag their feet when it comes to
enacting “the will of the people” if they can get away with it (Hi Brexit!). Of
course, if the leaders are powerful enough to simply overrule the vote and do
what they wanted to do in the first place, they’ll do that, and nowhere are
leaders more powerful than on campus, leading to today’s topic:

The Leftist
takeover of our campuses is often presented as a student-initiated movement,
but I have my doubts. The above campus had a statue of Jefferson’s grandson on
it, and somehow the lunatics running the place were offended by the grandson of someone who owned slaves. I
guess they had reasons:

the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
chapter at FSU had spearheaded a referendum in 2016 calling for the Eppes
statue’s removal on the grounds that he was “especially racist” and “especially
pro-slavery.”

--emphasis
added.

For years now,
the weapon of “RACIST” has been bashed against the head of every enemy of these
guys. Bottom line, it’s been used so much it’s blunted. So now they have to
label people “especially” racist for
the weapon’s blows to even register. Sheesh.

And so that
statue needed to go. I still suspect this has as much to do with his
relationship to Jefferson as with his own, alleged, actions. What has happened
to us as a people that we’re remotely capable of holding a grandchild
responsible for the actions of a grandparent who died scores of years ago? For
what it’s worth, a Leftist hellhole called North Korea does hold grandchildren responsible for the actions of dead
grandparents (click the link you don’t believe me)….I only mention this
because it really seems like the goal of the Leftists running so many of our
campuses may well be to turn them into little North Koreas.

Much like with
Donald Trump’s Hollywood star, it seems the lunatic left is determined to erase
even trifling evidence of things they don’t like, such as the liberty Jefferson
thought was a good idea. But there needed to be a vote, and the students voted
very strongly (70%) to keep the statue. Good for them! If they had voted to
remove the statue, I assure the gentle reader it would have been removed
overnight, and there would never be a vote to put the statue back.

Our leaders, oh so
eager to extoll the virtues of democracy when it goes their way, have a
completely different view when the vote goes against them (hi Hillary!). The
Poo Bah of this campus is no different and simply overrules the student vote:

…he will not only remove the Eppes statue,
but will also seek legislative approval to erase former Florida Supreme Court
Justice B.K. Robert’s name from the main building at the College of Law.

--I won’t
bother to address the un-personing of Robert. It’s sick that the dead are being
attacked this way for beliefs which were pretty common in their day, however.

And…that’s that.
I’ve said many times the power our campus Poo-Bahs wield is absolute, and I
feel this is an unarguable example. The worst case scenario, assuming any
fallout from the gross abuse of power, is the Poo-Bah will be removed, and
granted a huge golden parachute on the way out. To add insult to injury, he’ll
use his fluorescent virtue-signaling here in boldly overruling a vote and bravely
having his minions destroy a statue to land another plum position in higher ed
in short order.

I grant that this
is petty tyranny, but I assure the gentle reader: if this is the lengths these
Leftists will go to over something as piffling as a statue, you can bet they’re
more than willing to destroy all of higher education in pursuit of their
ideology.

There is a small
protest against this abuse of power, but it’s irrelevant:

The FSU College Republicans vehemently
condemned Thrasher’s decision in a statement on its Facebook page,
saying the school’s president “has decided to cave in to the whims of the loud
minority...in lieu of listening to the overwhelming 71.7% majority of FSU
students who voted to keep the Eppes statue in place less than two years ago.”

The gentle reader
should understand there is no call to remove statues of Lincoln, or even Martin
Luther King, Jr., even though they too were less than perfect. The people who
disagree with these historical figures have too much decency to assault the
dead, you see, and that’s something the Poo-Bah here, and others of his ilk,
simply do not possess.

In the meantime,
any prospective student considering going to college should absolutely avoid
this place, as there’s no reason to suspect education will be a priority here.
Instead, the priority will be whatever the Poo-Bah wants it to be, namely,
plenty of loot for himself and advancement of ideology, as per the tenets of
campus edu-fascism.

Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Identity politics
has been an issue on campus for as long as I’ve been in higher ed. It used to
be primarily in hiring, where we were “motivated” to hire people with certain
genitals or skin color, on the basis that there “weren’t enough” of such in
associated positions.

I confess for
some time I at least sipped the Cool-Aid. At first, when I was on the hiring
committee, I went along with ruling out certain types of genitals or skin
color, or more accurately restricting the hiring options to certain genitals or
skin color. I was young and stupid, far too concerned with academics to sit and
think through the consequences of going along with administrative directives in
this regard.

After around 20
years in higher ed, and starting to see that I had just reinforced the glass
ceiling above my head…I began to ask questions. Admin considered them
impertinent and I was punished for asking things like “how do we know that a
female will definitely be the best choice for this job?” and “by what metric is
a certain minority under-represented?” and “what evidence do we have that
diversity in the deans will make a better school?” among other questions.

I doubt I was the
only one expressing such concerns, but my worries were all brushed aside in the
name of identity politics. Higher ed has been doing this for decades now, and
so I’m not as surprised as most when seeing what is only the natural
consequence of making higher education more about identity politics than
education.

In 2011,
the campus was 63 percent Caucasian; in fall of 2017, it was less than 55
percent. Applications from underrepresented minority students doubled between
2008 and 2018, while overall applications during that time increased by just
half that much. Progress is being made — and the university is more diverse now
than at any time in its 117-year history — but there is still much work to do.

It doesn’t matter
that there’s no evidence that education and research will be improved by more
“diversity,” they only want more. Despite their “progress” in that regard, they
still only want more. There is no end here, at least no good end for
non-Diverse people.

It’s the
hypocrisy I care about, and these black colleges are rightfully never asked to
change. I see only hypocrisy in Cal Poly’s stated goals:

In it, administration details a multi-year effort with dozens
of initiatives, including ones to further lower the percentage of white
students on campus and increase the number of faculty of color.

Consider how
blatantly racist the above “effort” is. The “increase the number of faculty of
color” outrage has been going on with a wink and a nod for years, it’s only
recently that this level of racism has been so acceptable that they can now put
it in writing.

“Lower the
percentage of white students” is a bit of a problem: California college student
populations were soaring in prior decades, so many schools have been at
capacity. Granted, that may not be true today (I can’t find recent stats), but
the idea that some kid will be denied the chance to go to college because his
skin is white sickens me, sickens me just as much as if he were denied because
his skin is black.

Shouldn’t
scholarship, or at least demonstrated potential, be part of admissions
requirements?

For students, the school plans on recruiting applicants
more heavily based on race. For instance, the school has recently implemented
several new scholarships “aimed at recruiting more African-American and other
underrepresented minorities.”

How, exactly, is the above not racist?

It’s also working to recruit low-income and first-generation
students by partnering with high schools that enroll a high percentage of these
students, according to the report.

By “first-generation
students,” they’re referring to students from families who have never sent a
child to college. I always find these programs sinister, since many schools do
this for the same reason crocodiles prey on the young herd animals coming to a
river for the very first time: they make easy victims.

But back to the
identity politics aspect of this:

And the college announced its intention of forcibly increasing diversity in
“traditionally male-dominated majors” such as STEM and Architecture and
Environmental Design, according to the document.

--emphasis added.

Is anyone else
creeped out by the idea of forcibly
increasing diversity? How good could this idea be if you have to force people to do it? At least this is
more sexist than racist…or is that not an improvement? Why isn’t anyone on
campus standing up to this idea, an idea they know is so atrocious they’re just
going to force it?

Some of
these initiatives are well known — such as the university creating an Office of
University Diversity and Inclusion (OUDI) and hiring its first-ever vice
president and chief officer for diversity and inclusion — and others less
known, including the recruitment of senior-level administrators in the colleges
and divisions to lead diversity and inclusion efforts.

Oh goody,
another huge fiefdom to piss away all that student loan money, extracted from
kids who don’t know how they’re being screwed because they’re coming from first
generation families, with no parents to warn them they’re getting a fake
education.

This fall campus leaders will “require a diversity statement
from candidates for all faculty and staff searches,” the report states. It adds
that search committees will now be made up of diverse membership and Academic
Affairs has “set [an] expectation that search committees will be based on best
practices regarding diversity.”

And
here comes the chokehold: whites won’t be on the hiring committees if at all
possible. All hiring past this point will be identity based, and they’ll
literally use the racist and sexist hiring policies which got them on campus as
“best practices” to keep using racism and sexism in their hiring policies.

Addition of
diversity-related course requirements in many of the majors in CLA

An education used to be about academic
subjects, like mathematics, science, and history. More and more, these
requirements are being removed, and instead students are being required to take
diversity courses, i.e., indoctrination courses. Again, where is the evidence
that removing academics and replacing it with indoctrination will help
education and research?

A decade from now, when we have many
thousands of graduates from this college with worthless degrees, deep debt, and
no way to pay any of it off, it would be nice if the people who suckered those
graduates into coming to this trap of a college were forced to pay off those
loans, but I know that’s just crazy talk.

But considering how much crazy talk is in
this report, I hardly feel out of place saying it.

Drug use is pretty
heavy on campus, particularly marijuana. I’m not passing judgement here, though
I certainly advise against it (my personal experience is minimal), and hate
when students stumble into class surrounded by a foul-smelling cloud of stale
smoke. Everyone knows about this drug being used by college students, however.
There’s another drug very popular on campus I want to get to.

While marijuana
and other recreational chemicals (hi alcohol!) are very popular on campus, many
students also desire drugs for treatment of ADHD. Students with Attention Deficit
Hyperactivity Disorder take these drugs, usually Adderall, presumably, to help
them focus, in other words to help them study.

So, quite
naturally, “normal” students who intend to study take these drugs in the belief
that it will help them. Now, ADHD is a “spectrum” disease, which means,
technically, everyone has a little ADHD, some just have it worse than others,
so I can understand the thinking that, indeed, these drugs might be helpful for
everyone.

Apparently, most
every student on campus agrees with me, as the prices for (illegal) doses of
these drugs go up during mid-terms and exams, as the demand spikes (curiously,
even students who directly observe this basic economic principle still will
adhere to the communist/Keynesian economic doctrine, but I digress…). The
pharmacies also tend to run out of Adderall this time of year, but as yet
nobody in power has been able to connect the dots between this and the
increased demand on the black market.

But the study
says “healthy” students don’t benefit from the drugs, at least no more than a
placebo. I know, any reasonable person at this point in civilization
understands there’s little reason to accept the results of any study, but I
feel the need to address why this particular study might well make some sense.

When I first
started teaching in higher education nigh 30 years ago, I didn’t get students
with ADHD in my class. Now, every semester I get a half dozen or more; once
when I was teaching a low level course 30% of the class was so diagnosed.

Direct observation
on my part shows that, yes, ADHD students generally don’t do as well as
“healthy” students but…I’m not convinced this is a confirmation of ADHD. I’ve
tutored many, many, students on a 1 on 1 basis, and the bulk of them had this
sort of diagnosis—they get the tutoring because of the diagnosis, you see.

I know, I’m not a
medical professional, but of perhaps 100 such students I’ve worked with on a
close basis? One legitimately struck me having a true cognitive issue. The rest?
Well, a few had bad teachers, many were suffering from poor course design (I
suspect Common Core will succeed in making this a more common problem, hence
the name for it), and the majority simply had poor study skills or otherwise
were not good students. I helped the bulk of my 1 on 1 students, but I concede
I could do little for that one kid: he needed professional help and proper
career guidance, and I advised his mother as such after a month of trying and
failing a number of techniques with a kid who I honestly believed was not
stupid, but could not think straight long enough for a high school level math
problem.

The point of my
verbose anecdote is I’m quite confident that ADHD is heavily over-diagnosed,
although I can’t say for sure if my personal observation of a factor of 100 is
true (much bias in how I get kids to be tutored, after all). It’s really worth
noting that unlike “real” diseases, ADHD
seems to move along state and school district lines—schools
that offer more benefits to ADHD students get markedly more such students.

(Yet another
digression: it’s quite possible that the skyrocketing rates of autism are
likewise due to the increasing government benefits of an autism diagnosis, and
not entirely due to vaccinations.)

In the double-blind study, in which neither
researchers nor participants know who is receiving the placebo and who is
receiving the study medication, each student received Adderall in one session
and the placebo in the other. This allowed the researchers to see the effects
of the medication vs. placebo in individuals and across the group.

So, yes, the study
shows no benefits for “healthy” students these ADHD drugs. I strongly suspect
there are few, if any, benefits to the ADHD-diagnosed students for using these
drugs either, but good luck getting funding for such a study.

This is just how
insidious our “health care” system is today. Not only do we have wide swaths of
our children being given drugs of probable no benefit, we have the “healthy”
kids paying black market prices to get those drugs, because they supposedly
might “help” them, too.

Meanwhile, the
only thing you ever hear about on the news is how much Russia is a threat to
everyone. Russia might not be our buddy, but I doubt it rates in the top 10 of
serious problems this country, or even the world, really needs to address.

Wednesday, August 22, 2018

YouTube is such a fine resource for
learning things. It’s only drawback (beyond the way how it supports pedophilia and censors counter-narrative views) is the one common to
any learning tool: if you don’t know what you should know, you’re unlikely to
learn it. Today I’ll highlight a couple stories which strike me as fairly
typical.

A Single Death is a Tragedy; a Million
Deaths is a Statistic

--attributed to Stalin.

Student loan debt in this country is now around $1.5 trillion. When I started this blog 5 years
ago, it was under a trillion dollars, but it can only head up, because these
loans, in many cases, simply cannot be paid back. Trouble is, numbers this
large are just statistics, they don’t register for most people.

YouTube to the rescue, as it has
individual testimonials, “single deaths” of people from student loan debt. I
want to highlight a few, because what we’re doing to our next generation with
these debts is positively criminal…though in today’s generally lawless society
(at least for those at the top), no charges will ever be filed.

“It was my lack of experience, and my naivety, that put me in this
position…”

In order for a student to qualify for
student loans, the student must go to an accredited school. Accredited schools
certify, in writing, that they will
act with integrity…but many accredited schools regularly exploit lack of
experience and naivety in kids as they come out of high school, signing them up
for a mountain of debt.

So, yes, there are those who point and
laugh at this art student for foolishly getting so much debt for an art
degree…but I find this as unsettling as pointing and laughing at a baby for
crying when an adult rips candy from the baby’s hands.

“…I owe over $100,000, and that number will continue to grow…”

It didn’t start out this way for her. She
graduated with a “mere” $16,000 in debt, and even got a job. So what happened?

“…in 2009 I went back to school to get an MFA in art so I could be an
art professor…”

The above is how many get smashed by
student loans. After they get their bachelor’s and see that there’s not much
available, they go back to grad school. Now, yes, at this point perhaps the
schools are no longer taking advantage of kids right out of high school but we still
have a problem. The schools know full well they’re offering graduate degrees in
fields that can’t pay back what they’re charging, as only the schools are
hiring those graduate degrees (and moreover the schools flood the market with
people for these scarce jobs)...they set the pay, you see. There’s an obvious
conflict of interest here as the schools once again knowingly engage in hurtful
behavior.

By 2011, she graduated with over $90,000
in debt, got another job and started making payments. Trouble was, the payments
were too much based on what the school was paying her, so she asked for help.

She got reamed.

“…I got in an IBR repayment plan…”

Most student loans are in default, or
would be if they were being honestly accounted. One trick is “IBR” repayment, “Income
Based Repayment,” which lowers your payments based on your income. There are
many variations on IBR, but they all screw you. Even if you’re not being paid
much, you’re making payments, so it’s all good, right? Nope:

“…my loan hadn’t gone down…my loan went up $4,000…I’ve been paying every
month…”

Yes, you’re making payments, but you’re
not covering the interest, so your loan goes up, now there’s more principal on
the loan, so you owe more interest you can’t pay. It’s a death spiral. She
didn’t know what she was signing up for.

“…you shouldn’t have to get a degree in finance to get a degree…”

She had no idea how she was being screwed,
but she’s not alone, there are 40,000,000 people with student loans now. Many
of them are being tricked into this abyss.

Our schools have millions and millions of
dollars to pay the coach of even a badly losing team, and millions more to pay
the coach after he leaves the school. But they have no money at all available
to stop this, even though these scams have been screwing over their students
for years now.

She’s already figured out her job as a
professor will never pay back the system that indebted her to become a
professor, and she’s learned, too late, that even though she’ll be effectively
bankrupt forever, she can’t clear her student loan through bankruptcy, even
though she was taken advantage of every step of the way to her mountain of
student loan debt.

I assure the gentle reader, this
particular student is very far from alone. She has some good advice, too late to help herself with it…but I doubt any prospective student
will ever hear her words of wisdom freely available on YouTube, because how
would they find her?

My next student accrued over $200,000 in
debt, again getting suckered into the “go get a graduate degree” trap.

“…at the community college it was
like, here, take this free money…I was not fiscally wise…”

So many kids are cheated like this in
community college, it’s pathetic. Some 28% of students with loan debt
don’t even know it.
How could that possibly happen in a system acting with integrity? Doing the
math that means well over 10,000,000 of our kids with student loan debt had no
idea they signed up for it until after school. The vast majority of community
colleges should be shut down, plain and simple.

“…undergrad, I accrued about $45,000 in…debt.”

She immediately went back to grad school,
spending another 6 years getting her Ph.D. She didn’t have to make payments
while in grad school, and thought that was great…but once again the interest on
that loan simply compounded.

“…over $200,000 accruing at 5.8% every month…I just don’t think about
it.”

When she finishes paying this off (if she
does), she’ll have paid over $750,000 for this loan. The actual cost to the
school for educating her was probably around $10,000. How is this not
exploitative? She wasn’t dealing with a sketchy fly-by-night loan place,
either:

“…this is Sally Mae. They just got handed
billions of dollars!”

It really is demented how our country’s
system creates money from nothing, and uses it to enslave, rather than help,
the citizens. I sure look forward to a time when I’m not so alone in wondering
why we have such an evil system.

“…work in a field where I make nothing…”

I again point out: the schools charging
so much for graduate degrees know they’re trapping the students into a deadly
system, because they know how much professors will make.

“…how ridiculous higher education has become…”

Well, at least she learned something in
her ordeal. Too bad finding these types of videos is too tough to expect kids
to see them before stumbling onto campus.

“…the thing that makes me the
saddest…I wanted to be a parent….the more we make the more we pay in student
loans.”

She’s now heading towards her late 30s,
and is doomed. By the time she pays off that debt, assuming she can, she’ll be
close to 60. So, theoretically, at the age of 60, she’ll be able to afford to
have a child. Higher education didn’t just enslave her, they’ve effectively
sterilized a generation, and in many cases they’re taking the most intelligent
of our population out of the gene pool.

“…they sell you this dream world with
no intention of following up.”

The schools have a very bloody hand in the
carnage they’ve wreaked on a whole generation. I shouldn’t be alone in seeing
that higher education has a real problem here.

More importantly, I shouldn’t be alone in
seeing how to fix it: end the student loan scam.

Sunday, August 19, 2018

Our campuses are
basically kingdoms. I’ve mentioned many times how fiefdoms, almost none of
which have anything to do with education, soak up much of the student loan
money, but today I want to talk about the immense power the Poo-Bah, the guy
who’s running the whole school has, because he is the law on campus, regardless
of what any stinkin’ piece of paper says.

I’ve spoken
before of the kangaroo
campus court system, and the gentle reader should put very little stock
in rulings made there, even if, as the university is prone to announce, the
findings in the system are “unanimous.” The system is generally rigged, and is
used to cover most everything on campus, from minor policy details to the most
grotesque rape.

Whenever some
dispute occurs, a “jury” is convened, a panel of faculty (or possibly purely
admin). Regardless of composition, these poor souls generally must do whatever
admin tells them to do…if this committee disagrees with what admin wants, the
gentle reader can rest assured they’re only making that disagreeable ruling
because there’s simply no way to assert anything different. To really hammer
this point home, I’ve seen a committee unanimously determine that it’s simply a
matter of policy that 12 divided by 5 is 2.35—I’m serious, the five of them
(one of them with a Ph.D. in Math Education) put together did that calculation
to two decimal places even after I tried to explain it was incorrect.

I honestly don’t
think the committee was as incompetent as they claimed, but I relate the story
because that’s generally how far a committee will go to appease admin.

“…a senior sociology major at Southern Illinois University
Edwardsville, went to the emergency room to report that she had just been raped
by a classmate. Campus police arrived to take her statement, and the nurse
examiner found a bruise on her cervix, which often indicates sexual
assault. “

When there’s a campus crime, things go a bit differently than what a
citizen might think. The report doesn’t go to the police, it goes to the
“campus police,” which basically is about as legit as your typical retail store
security: they’re only going to do whatever the store manager (or the Poo-Bah
in this case) tells them to do.

The basic facts are as follows:

She hadn't been drinking. She said she had told her
assailant "no" at least seven times. She told a friend she'd been
assaulted almost immediately after she got the classmate out of her apartment —
and then made a report to law enforcement within hours. And while text messages
showed that Reed's classmate tried to text her the next day, she never texted
back. Instead, she reported the incident to both campus police and the
college's Title IX Office.

Because sex crimes and sexual discrimination are so common on campus,
and because such things are routinely covered up, our Federal government passed
a law, “Title IX” in an attempt to stop it.

Sadly, all the new law has done has created another huge wasteful
fiefdom on campus. You really can’t use a law to create integrity, as many
campuses have demonstrated.

She made her report to the Title IX fiefdom, and they leaped into
action, as per Federal law. They investigate, and I can respect that takes
time. Four months later:

“…the Title IX Office found that Reed's classmate had
not violated any university policies. The seven-page report never even mentions
the bruise on her cervix. Instead, it dwells at length on the fact that she may
have misstated whether she was in the bathroom or in the car when she sent a
text message to a friend following the incident — a fact even the report
acknowledges was "not in and of itself very significant."

So we have an
obvious whitewash. Federal law allows the student to appeal this finding.Again, Federal law mandates a committee must
be formed and to make a ruling. How’d that go?

Great! She won on
appeal. I have to admit, I’ve never seen anyone win on appeal—the system is so
rigged, I’ve literally seen the same “judges” for the appeal be the same
“judges” who made the original ruling, and literally destroy any new evidence
presented…if they’re following admin orders the first time, they’ve going to do
it again. It’s a stupid system all the way through.

But, somehow, she
won the appeal. Good for her, but it’s pointless. There was obvious
whitewashing by the Title IX office, so clearly that’s what admin wanted. What
will admin do since the evidence was so overwhelming that this Federally
mandated panel had to concede the student’s claim?

The student is still fighting, but it’s a
lost cause even as I wish her luck. You can’t win on campus, they hold all the
cards. Maybe she should try the “real” criminal justice system, not that it’s
great shakes either.

There are two points I want to make with
this. The first is straightforward: no matter what happens on campus, the
Poo-Bah can bury it. This ultimately explains why it’s so common to have sex
scandals run on campus for a decade or much more before finally being caught.

While not as horrific, another important
issue is we’ve trusted the rulers of higher ed with hundreds of billions of
student loan money, because written policies say they’ll act with integrity.

In light of the above, which didn’t even
make any national news…why would anyone remotely suspect our Poo-Bahs are
treating education (and all that sweet, sweet, student loan money) any more
respectfully than they do Federal law or victims of sex crimes?

Thursday, August 16, 2018

Jon Stossel is one
of the last few remaining investigative reporters, and used to be on television
quite often, 20 years ago. His big career-killing problem was he tends to
investigate government waste and corruption. It’s painfully obvious today that
much (all?) of our mainstream media is just another department of our
government, or at least the deep state, and thus has no interest in revealing
its own corruption. Stossel found himself off the government-controlled
airwaves because he was just too good at his job.

Thus he’s
consigned to “fringe” “alternative” media sites like Reason. He’s recently
released a video detailing a scam I write about often:

The video itself
is more evidence of how the world has changed in the last 20 years. We’re in a
post-literate society, which is just a fancy way of saying people don’t read
much anymore. If you want to disseminate knowledge today, you must use video.
I’ve considered doing some videos, but the whole “anonymity” thing might make
it tough, and I do lack the technical skill to make much beyond me talking.

Anyway, the video
is short—another sign of the times, as people just can’t focus for very long.
It’s one of the (many, admittedly) reasons the film industry is suffering so in
theatres, and people just can’t tear themselves away from their phones for a whole
hour and a half. Ok, nowadays a movie is usually an hour and a half of SJW
posturing against a backdrop of explosions (hi Last Jedi!), but still.

He says some
things in this short video (along with a summary transcript for us dinosaurs
who still read), and he misses a mark or two. I’ll cut him some slack because
he’s trying to cover this ground fast enough to reach people who are so addled
by today’s world they can’t think clearly for much past five minutes, but I’ll
make some clarifications all the same.

For those who
don’t have time, the above is basically everything you need to know about
higher education in America today: for the vast majority, it’s a big waste of
time, and for anyone who pays taxes, it’s a big waste of money.

He says taxpayer money mostly helps more
people signal their ability to conform to college
expectations.

--emphasis
added.

While the above
is true, the clarification needed is a college degree used to be a valid signal the holder was exceptional
in some way. Today’s college degrees are mostly meaningless, since the average
GPA is close to A-, and many schools mandate that a certain percentage of
students pass every course…a degree is more of a rubber stamp of a person
having a pulse than any exceptionality. Toss in how most degrees are in
subjects of minimal, if any, job value and we’re back in rip-off territory
again.

Caplan responds that if students wanted
to learn they can just walk on to a campus and attend class. Caplan says
professors are happy to let the student attend. But few students do that.

The above is an
odd thing to say. Yes, I don’t have a problem if someone wants to attend class,
but I’ve received many warnings from admin not to let unregistered students in
my classes. This is merely a minor detail, since the modern world really does
allow anyone to read and learn about anything without much effort or expense without
setting foot on campus (hi internet!).

Caplan does think college is great for a few people like
him—tenured professors. He can never be fired, gets paid well, and only has to
teach classes for five hours a week.

"That's a scam," Stossel responds, "we're paying so
much money for people like you to teach five hours."

"Yeah. Well, I'm a whistleblower," Caplan quips.

My blog has shown
time and again that “tenure” and “can never be fired” are far from synonymous,
and shame on Stossel for not being aware of that fact. That said, yes, “tenured
professor at a legitimate school” is a wonderful job to have…but there are very
few of those. Most college courses are taught by sub-minimum wage adjuncts, and
some schools are trying to get the
teaching done for free now, the better to yield money to the plunderers running
many of these places.

Moreover, the
professor being interviewed used the time granted by his cushy job to write a
book warning people away from college
and exposing what a scam so much of it is. Maybe he’ll save a few people from
destroying themselves in college. This highlights how professors got these
cushy jobs, or used to get them, anyway. The whole reason scholars are given so
much free time in their jobs is because writing books to help humanity is a
thing they do in their free time.

I’m just not
concerned with the few and dying faculty with cushy jobs, not when admin
outnumber faculty by a wide margin, are paid vastly more, and many have jobs
just as cushy. I’ve never, ever, seen an admin write a book trying to help
humanity, and I’ve seen quite a few actively hurt human beings in many ways.

All the free
money flowing onto campus has warped things, and since the profit margin on
“education” today is so large, colleges compete to get people willing to pay
for it. Before the student loan scam, this competition was done by getting the
best faculty, having the most successful programs, and earning a stellar
reputation. What do colleges do now?

“…many compete by advertising luxury…”

I know I’m
something of a one-note singer, but Stossel only scratches the surface of what
the student loan money has done to our campuses. Prospective students are now
promised lobster dinners for coming to campus, a campus often decorated with a
luxury resort-style pool and other recreational areas. 600 colleges now have
rock climbing walls—they do look interesting even if most people have the sense
not to use them. No matter, “looks” are what it’s all about now.

“…used to be reading, writing, and
arithmetic. Well now we’re the 4th ‘r,’ recreation.”

The above quote
from the video nicely sums up higher education after years of drowning in
student loan money. Please, please, just stop the student loan scam already.